Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 10/19/26
Hey everybody, welcome to the chat.
I wrote about my fielding bible ballot today, so I'm happy to answer questions on that. Honestly I'm happy to answer questions about almost anything. Chatting is fun, and so is playoff baseball.
Incidentally, lunch is a meal kit today, not too exciting sorry. I'm recapping tonight's game and so my leftovers from last night are tonight's dinner.
Favorite thing from the ALCS? I think it's Freddy hitting 99 for me, but 3 hole Chandler Simpson also really brought me joy
My favorite single thing so far was the Bailey/Kwan relay combination yesterday. My goodness, that was slick.
I know better outfield arms exist, but how impressive have the throws been from Steven Kwan and Victor Mesa Jr been in this series? I saw an interview with Kwan where he said he can hit 100 on a janitor throw, which 1) insane, he's small 2) really fun new term!
Yeah, the Kwan throw was great, and then Bailey kind of skip-sliding backwards to deny Walls an easy slide was also awesome. Lots of catchers would not turn Kwan's throw into an out given the positioning of everyone there. You don't see tags that look just like that very often. And of course, Kwan had to come up firing and hit perfectly to even give Bailey a chance.
The Mesa Jr. throw is also a great call. The one I'm thinking of is when he got the ball in to hold Nate Lowe to a single.
I shrieked a little bit, my wife was like 'what's wrong?'
"Don't worry, just a great relay throw" is not a normal thing to hear after the sound I made, haha
That was just crazy. On a line, from deep right to second, hit the guy in the glove. I guess this is a slight spoiler for the rest of my ballot but Mesa Jr. is on the RF list, and I was kind of shocked by how much systems liked him so I watched a LOT of him before voting. His arm is just ludicrous
Orioles owner David Rubenstein said to the Economic Club of DC last week: "A lot of my friends were buying teams, and I realized they're making money. They're making more money that I'm making in private equity."
Yeah. I bet the other owners were not THAT pleased.
also I loved his 'well I took over a first-place team and now we're in last" self-dig. I'm predisposed to be a little suspicious of him not spending more, but I have to say I love the candor, and I'm warming up to the O's after being critical of how they were so reluctant to push chips in early in the Gunnar/Adley window.
But Rubenstein also said that they wanted to win even more than making money.
Yeah. I thought it was a very good interview overall. And while I'd expect him to say that even if he didn't believe it, I think I believe him here.
Are you also singing the Brewers Tik Tok song around the house, and is your wife as sick of it as mine?
Well she's from Milwaukee, so no. But yes, I have been singing it.
Was Ty France's lower innings total a difference maker in your fielding bible decision?
Some? I think the real tiebreaker was that I'm just more sure I'm right about Olson being great because I've seen him do it for a very long time. If France was clearly ahead, I wouldn't mind voting for him even without that. And if he were just head and shoulders ahead of everyone else on a rate basis, I could live with that too. Like, Matt Chapman was 6 runs per 1000 innings ahead of the other 3b contenders for me.
France was ~2 runs per 1000 innings ahead of Olson in my blend, and Olson was ahead overall because of the extra volume, plus Olson looked better to me (though first is a very tough eye test, for sure), and has the track record.
That was a tough one, though. Those two guys are way better than the rest of the first base defenders. To give you an idea, I had Olson about half a run better. And then there's like a 4-5 run gap between France and Vlad in third on my raw rankings
The Nats have some interesting Rule 5 decisions to make, particularly with pitchers (Susana; Sykora; Rosario). Or do they? The last time that a new CBA was being hashed out, there was no Rule 5 draft. What is the likelihood of a Rule 5 draft in 2026? I'm sure that the Nats would be fine with no Rule 5 draft, because then they could continue to work with the eligible players during any lockout.
I am not sure of the exact way the Rule 5 will shake out because the minors are in the CBA now, but I'm expecting it not to happen this year, or to happen in a modified way. I think Rule 5 might be totally upended by the new CBA, even, given that there's been discussion of changes. But I think that the most likely outcome here is a positive one for the Nats, where either there's no rule 5 or they change the rules but with some grace period.
In the Fielding Bible you mentioned 2nd being stacked, where on the infield do you find league depth the shallowest?
First doesn't have a ton of depth, though you know, first base defense is tough to measure anyway.
But i think where it's most notable is third. The old guard (JRam/Arenado/Chapman/Machado) are on the decline and there isn't a new obvious group to replace them yet.
Chapman got my vote this year, and I kinda think Bregman will win, so it's not like the old guys aren't still kicking around. But not for THAT much longer, and I don't see a lot of great defenders or people I expect to become great defenders as I look down the list.
I don't think there's anything structural about that, necessarily, just the ebbs and flows of the game.
Just want to give a tip of the cap to the Halloween-themed banner. I think it's a great idea to do fun seasonal things like that. Top of the 13th with a ghosty on 2nd for us nerds, too. Fun!
Fangraphs playoffs odds consistently saw the Dodgers as 75%+ favorites if they had made the World Series. Does that seem intuitively right to you? To me it seems "obviously" too high, not because of anything that happened in the NLCS but because baseball is a very difficult-to-predict game, such that 75-25 seems inherently too aggressive a prediction for a short series.
Yeah, I agree. I don't think our odds are all that well suited for the playoffs, to be honest, because of the way they're constructed. I don't think they're like WAY off or anything, but the way they work, with aggregate team strengths and log5, seems to make favorites a little too favored in short series for me. I like the ZiPS odds for playoff series as a result. ZiPS had the Dodgers as 58/42 coming into the Milwaukee series which seems way sharper to me.
to be clear I don't think our odds are bad or anything. I just know that they're not really designed to fit playoff considerations well. whereas Dan's are more granular, which I think is how you want to simulate the playoffs.
Does expansion benefit both players (more jobs) ans owners (expansion fees)? What is the biggest obstacle standing in the way of this finally happening?
It definitely benefits both sides if done correctly. The obstacles in the way of it happening are that the owners have to want a cash infusion, because they're basically selling future cash flows (some share of the league revenue) in exchange for expansion fees. And I also think owners tend to view expansion as something they can get concessions from players for, or use as a threat to secure stadium deals; Manfred famously said that there couldn't be expansion until the A's and Rays worked out new stadiums, which you can easily understand as 'we cna't hand out an expansion until we've used the threat of relocation to get some cash from municipalities'
Should Yankees fans be comforted by the how the Dodgers spent forever getting to the playoffs without winning it all before one day they just did. Maybe Cashman is right, the playoffs are just random, and if they just keep getting there one day they will win, no big changes needed? Maybe all the NY fans are just overreacting like always
I think it can be both. I definitely believe that there's a lot of randomness that you can't see or perceive in these. The Dodgers were kind of classic postseason chokers until they won two in a row and everyone decided they had solved it.
But at the same time, the Dodgers didn't just keep doing the same thing over and over until it worked. They changed their team construction. They leaned more into paying top line starters and planning around it. I don't think that's the only move, but I guess my point is that you can't just keep doing the same thing and saying 'eh we got unlucky', but luck is absolutely a big part of this all.
Like, what if Pages doesn't make that catch, or what if the Padres hang on against the Dodgers in the 2024 NLDS?
It's a great sports week with baseball, WNBA finals, football, hockey, AND the NBA starting.
I'm getting more into WNBA this year because the Valkyries are in it and the city is behind them in a fun way. It's kind of a replacement for NCAA basketball for me; NBA is like the physical ideal form of basketball, but the tactics/fundamentals are more fun at levels that aren't quite so perfected, like where Kevin Durant doesn't exist basically.
this weekend was awesome. there was basically something cool on at all times if you wanted, and a lot of high stakes games too.
"the playoffs are a crap shoot" FO strategy is the worst thing to happen to MLB…bunch of teams just aim for 85 win projections and call it a day
Well I don't think I agree with that formulation of it at all. I think that being a better regular season team CLEARLY helps you in the playoffs. It's been a while since a crappy team won the WS, imo
But there's still a ton of variance even if you're a 95-win team. Like, you might have a 25% chance to a bad team's 10% chance. But variance is still enormous in both cases.
There are multiple great teams every year.
Do you think any of the lack of new third base defenders on part with Arenado, Bregman etc has to do with teams becoming more willing to have bigger shortstops? for instance not even that far back I’d imagine that 6’3 Konnor Griffin might be looked at as more of a 3B
Yeah, surely part of it.
Thoughts on the outfield positioning rules being tested in AZ? It seems to me a reasonable goal in general to make power a slightly less dominant strategy. Like, raise the BA of nonHR in play to the point that more guys can hit the BA numbers needed to offset lower power? And this seems like one idea targeted at that. Not sure how I feel aesthetically…
Yeah, I'm into it. I also don't think we'll care that much aesthetically in the long run. Like, no one's whining about the aesthetics of the shift ban anymore even though people really were at first.
Tampa was repeatedly used as a relocation threat for years before they got an actual team.
Yeah, and now the circle is complete.
Do you think Michael Busch rebounds, or do you think last year was the aberration? He almost doubled his walk total year-over-year, but in the process he also lost 30pts of wRC+ and 130pts of SLG. On the face of it it seems like a case of just being too picky, but also he’s never lit up the x-stats on Statcast because he’s got Kwan-like bat speed within the contact profile.
I've never been a believer really, at least relative to consensus, and I think I'm still of that general view.
Like, I think he's just a league average first base bat. I kept shading him down on trade value stuff because I couldn't wrap my head around this working at a 40% above average clip long-term. I do think that he'll probably settle into a happy medium of power that's better than this year's output, but probably vewer walks because I don't think his underlying stats support such a high walk rate, particularly like you said, without that much power.
How do rate defensive positions in importance? I strongly disagree with the 1st base penalty. A good first baseman saves many errors and influences the outcome of games in a very significant way.
I think that the first base penalty is almost certainly too high
More broadly, though, I think that defensive value is much more useful when put in context than when taken in isolation.
A below-average third baseman and an average first baseman aren't really equal value, I'd rather have the first baseman. But on the other hand, I'd rather have an average third baseman than an average first baseman. And if you can hit, the bar at each position moves a ton, and more at the "less difficult" ones
like, if you're not an offensively bad defender, and you are a great hitter, I don't think teams value 2b/3b/1b/lf/rf very differently
but if you're an average hitter, well, you can get away with that at second but not first.
basically we're reducing all this stuff to one number, which eats a ton of nuance. But I think that the way teams actually deploy players and actually value defense is very hard to turn into a single number.
Prematurely writing the Guardians obituary here, but assuming they lose to the Rays does anybody have it worse in the playoffs than Cleveland? Best team in the mid 90s with no WS to show for it, blow a 3-1 series lead against Boston in '07, and now continued success for 10+ years that always flames out with no real team construction changes to speak of re: your point with the Dodgers
Yeah it's been a tough run, particularly in the playoffs, for them. The no team construction changes thing makes me less surprised that they haven't been able to make it work in the 2020s, but that 2016 team was obviously great and easily could have won a WS. The 90s teams surely could have. Even if the Guardians are putting together low-likelihood teams and not changing their ways enough, well, they've had a LOT of bites at the apple. Bad beat to have missed on every single one of them.
On the defensive value talk, I always imagine a hypothetical team with two identical excellent defenders that have to play separate positions. For example, let's imagine the royals are allowed to have a bobby witt clone. The original bobby plays an excellent SS and almost certainly accrues much more WAR than the clone bobby playing second. Is this a flaw in the valuation? the clone will presumably have a very easy time at second and maybe bats slightly better because of it, but I don't think it's a given. Is WAR supposed to punish/reward players for having good/bad treammates?
I mean, I think it's not actually clear he would have less defensive value — but in Witt's case, specifically, I think he would.
average shortstops often get MORE value at second because suddently they're like a +10 defender there. or guys who have a weak arm can play way up at second
but given that Witt is already pushing the boundaries of how many plays you can make from shortstop, I'm fairly sure he'd just have less ways to impact the game at second, as in he can't stand out from his peers as much.
but yes, this is a great question about what WAR is supposed to do, and I think the truth is that it's not "supposed" to do either. It's what you make of it, and that's the reason that people make a lot of bad faith arguments about WAR. They basically say that it's "supposed' to do x, then show that it does y, and bam, gotcha
Another way of putting this is that if I actually thought baseball could be reduced to a single number, I would definitely not be a baseball analyst, b/c that's boring as hell
Do you buy the Nats being better next year? As a Nats fan, my worry is that it's more likely the offense gets worse than the pitching gets better.
I'm really worried about hte pitching. I concur with you that I don't expect the offense to be this good again. Just because, c'mon, it was really good! But their pitching didn't look like it was bad for fluky reasons or anything, it was just terrible. Cavalli is a nice start on turning that around, but they just need MUCH more volume of good pitching. Alvarez makes me somewhat excited. So does Early. But I think that with reasonable attrition rates, you coudl see some really bad pitchers throwing a lot of innings for them next year if they don't go out and invest heavily, via trade or free agency, in useful depth arms.
I enjoyed your article on infield defense. I love defense and wonder if the game will make a real try to get more balls in play so we can enjoy the acrobatic brilliance of these great athletes.
Couldn't agree more. I think that the outfield positioning and check swing liberalization changes are both steps in the right direction for this.
While I am happy to see that there is going to be a WS champion that is either brand spanking new or a very aged retread I have been disappointed in the quality of the games. I fear for the direction the game is headed. When a team reaches the ALCS then fans 19 times in a 9 inning game only to set the new all-time record, not seen even once since 1876, of 21 K's just 2 games later has to make people take notice. I am more than a wee bit afraid that K's will continue to increase and nothing will be done until it is just a game of catch between the pitcher and the catcher.
expanding on this: clearly, the Rays, Guardians, and Brewers are teams who respond to incentives and try to win with limited resources.
as the game has made some changes that seem to make speed more viable, and speed/defense remain cheap, they're all leaning into it
the problem is that the incentives of the game also lean heavily towards strikeout-getting pitchres, so you're also seeing these teams go absolutely nuts on run prevention by just trying to never let the other team put the ball in play in addition to playing great defense.
so I think we know that teams will respond to incentives. The next thing is just how to make strikeouts less of an obvious thing to go for on the pitching side. and from that standpoint, I do worry about the outfield limits. Like, yes, if you make it harder for people to field batted balls, hitters might try to make more contact. But uh, pitchers will hear 'your fielders won't be as good' and try to miss more bats.
so I think that if you're trying to increase balls in play, you can't just give hitters incentives to make contact. That's only half of the struggle. You have to make pitchers' bat-missing strategies less profitable.
I think the check swing automation change would be big on this front. If more of the down-breaking/chase pitches are turned into balls by fiat, those pitches get less exciting.
I'm not 100% sure I agree on postseason quality of play. I'd agree that the ALCS has been a little scratchy, but the first three games of Brewers / Padres were mesmerizing and even if it concluded a sweep Game Four of the NLCS was a mini-classic.
So, the Brewers have played eight games and they've all been great. But the AL playoffs have been ugly, imo, as an aesthetic baseball fan. They've been largely exciting, and there's nothing wrong with that. but also a lot of bad offense
Do you have any thoughts on the A's hiring Taylor Smith as POBO? Seems like a solid candidate from what little is out there about him
Yeah, when I know as little as I do here relative to what teams do, I default to assuming it makes sense until I have more evidence to change my view.
Do you think there will be a change in the metric the general public views defense in the next 10 years? Similar to the shift towards things like SLG/OPS on offense, do you see the mainstream describing defense using DRS or OAA rather than errors or fielding pct?
I am hopeful that, even without quoting the exact numbers, people will get more comfortable saying 'good range/bad range' based on DRS and OAA. I think that broadcasts are already doing this even if they don't quote the numbers. No one was saying Steven Kwan was bad at defense last year even with all of his throwing errors, you know?
I am not holding out hope that suddenly people will be talking about '+10 defenders' on broadcasts or anything like that. But I don't need that. I don't need broadcasts to be super data-literate or anything. If a metric is good for tv, it's hopefully good in a way that can be conveyed in simple words, and i think that trying to explain just how OAA/FRV works is more than I'd want from my announcer.
but the announcers knowing this, and couching their description of defenders in it? I think it's already happening.
Speaking to a close friend and big baseball fan, he said the games have been "close but dull" which I agreed with.
Yeah. Well said.
The AL side of the bracket has for sure been bad this year, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on one year of the playoffs. The AL was bad generally this year, now you're telling me that a lot of the AL playoff games have been mediocre? I'mshockedwellnotthatshocked.gif
Also well said. I do think that the Guardians style of baseball tends ot lead to playoff games I don't personally enjoy, but that's just a broad observation, and hey man, play to win, not to make Ben Clemens think your games are pretty.
Martin Maldonado is now the Tigers "quality control coach." What is that? Is he testing the Gatorade for bacteria?
I don't know his exact roles but this job is popping up in a lot of sports fields, and it makes sense to me. I think of it as a minister without portfolio whose job is to look for processes/parts of the team that are just clearly inefficient or bad
it's a lot easier to see these things 'from the outside', as it were. Like, if I'm the defensive positioning sheet generator, I have a ton of preconceived notions of good and bad and it might be hard for me to realize that something isn't clicking, because I'm deeply in the weeds on it
but someone who does not have that context might more easily be able to see that a chagne is needed. Basically, in almost every field, I think that it's useful to have someone to whisper in the decision makers' ears that they're mortal
and i think that often, the person best suited to do that job is a broadly intelligent practitioner in the field without super specific domain knowledge. If you listen to how people talk about Maldonado, that sounds EXACTLY like who I'd want.
Shout out to Nate: well said!
Derek Dietrich is the Yankees "culture and accountability coordinator." Nothing to ask just think its hilarious
re: boring playoffs: I wonder if people are just expecting every postseason to be like last year’s World Series. Like, there’s a reason we all were riding a high a year ago, it’s because we hadn’t seen a Series like that in close to ten years. Memories are short and people get spoiled.
So, that seems right about making the K strategy less profitable — if possible. I am just not sure what could achieve that without also achieving a counterproductive support to power as the dominant strategy. Also, maybe pitcher incentive toward strikeouts is already dialed to 11?
Yeah, I mean, it's tough! You might have to deaden the ball too. Because yes, if you just make pitchers chuck it down the middle but leave hitting incentives the same, hitters are going to keep looking to hit tanks.
Unrelatedly, if you were a pitcher in a high-leverage situation would you not be super paranoid about your middle infielders having pitchcom? Everyone and their mother is on the lookout for pitch tipping and the tech multiplies the number of guys who can give something away
No because I'd really want them to be positioned correctly, and where I throw the ball has a lot to say about where they should stand.
or at least, where they shoudl think the ball is gonna go.
but also, I am not a paranoid person. If I were in the game, I'd endeavor to be so locked in that I make it someone else's job to tell me if there's tipping going on
I think that one of the really funny things about analyzing sports is that we spend SO much brainpower on monday morning quarterbacking in all its various forms. But to actually play at a high level, it's kind of important NOT to think.
if you start thinking when someone hits a ball 100 mph towards you, it's too late
you need to act so instinctively that you did it without conscious thought, or it's not gonna work
Anyone who doesn't enjoy watching baseball hasn't watched the Brewers. My son is 22 & has largely gotten away from watching baseball, but, we watched a # of the Brewers/Dodgers games & he got to the point where he would make me turn it on or he's watch it by himself when they were playing. Just fun team with a good brand of baseball.
So, the one downside of the Brewers' style of baseball is that sometimes their pitching is so good that watching the other team hit is no fun
The Dodgers are so scary that it didn't feel that way, of course. That's freaking Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts over there, the threat is always real.
the Brewers offense, and their defense when the other team is putting hte ball in play? delightful
and I think that suggests that the league has done a decent job of incentivizing those kinds of skills, because a lot of the smart teams have fast and fun players who put the ball in play on offense.
but they need to change the pitching incentives to make it all truly sing, imo
What do you think Cashman’s big Move is this offseason? This feels to me like a time when they see the farm system as thin and resort to taking on a bad contract (Machado and Chapman come to mind) to get an aging good player for less in prospects than he’d otherwise be worth
I could totally see that, but I think that the CBA and lockout make it all so confusing that they can't really act until after a deal is made. That raises the chances that this is a tread-water offseason b/c it'll just be harder to get trades done when every team is in wait and see mode
bummer for Judge
"you need to act so instinctively that you did it without conscious thought, or it's not gonna work" this applies neatly to fiction or narrative writing. once it's published, every word, sentence, theme is analyzed. but in order to write it, you need to find that creative crackle before your critical brain kicks in. oftentimes stuff is getting analyzed and your answer is "i don't know, it just kind of happened"
Yeah. I actually think that many things in life actually fit into this general description. Thinking about it after is important. Thinking about it before, as in knowing how to put yourself in positions such that your natural instincts are productive, is important. During? if your mind isn't on autopilot, your'e doing it wrong.
war2d2 listing both the Cubs and Guards as favorite teams should be considered a war crime after 2016
Where's the crying laughing emoji when you need it?
Has there ever been talk of a slightly heavier ball? Physics would seem to think it would slow down velocity and lessen distance.
I haven't seen that specifically but I've seen squishier ball, and yeah, I agree with you that heavier seems like it'd work similarly.
Does Kevin Mcgonigle have a chance to be a great 3B defender? My feeling was he was pretty good when he played 3B, maybe a few too many errors (that you'd think would lessen as he gets more experience), but, he definitely appeared to have the range, good arm, etc.
I think so. I actually gave some thought to voting for him 5th this year, but didn't because he was more good than great and didn't play that many innings there. But he looks the part to me. I'm not worried about the errors. Witt was a meh defender b/c of errors when he came up too
if you're looking at a single year, errors and defensive value in the infield are actually heavily correlated
but it's a lot easier to clean up errors than to clean up 'can you get to the ball and then throw it to first'
Will we see Kyle Harrison get into a World Series game?
I'll say yes. But largely because I'm stubborn and have gotten whiplashed so many times on evaluating Harrison that I don't want to flip flop AGAIN
man, I wrote an article about how guys like this rarely pan out after his trade to Boston. Then by the time I was finally like 'okay yeah maybe he's better than I thought', he collapsed
definitely one of the players I've evaluated worst in recent years
When your back is against the wall, you want to turn to a guy you trust. A proven winner. Jack Morris. John Smoltz. Orel Hershiser. Shawn Armstrong.
What a stretch by him! Two starts in three days and he pitched in the other game too?
I mean, that seems bad! I would not do that. But man, that's impressive stamina.
I generally agree with your answer here, but I’d push back slightly on “it’s been a while since a crappy team won the WS.” The 2023 WS was a matchup of two _pretty crappy_ teams. I was rooting for both of them to somehow lose.
Touche. I thought those teams were pretty decent, but not the most fun to watch. They were both better than their records, though, I think.
alright, I need to get back to some writing, but let me just take one last question and use it as an excuse to talk about a really good player who is somehow still kinda underrated
Not really a question but sometimes I just marvel at how good Bobby Witt Jr. is at being a baseball player. The fact that he hasn't won an MVP yet and so he doesn't get the national notoriety that he should is crazy to me.
Yeah, there's a little bit of early career Mike Trout to it, but it's even worse for Witt in that there are some other great players right now too.
Trout kind of fit into a gap where the previous era was on the downswing, and he popped up and was just amazing so fast. Witt did that but Judge and Ohtani are beasts and keep hogging the awards, and then you know, the first year that neither of those guys are contenders in the AL, Yordan goes nuclear in a down year for Witt offensively
I think a playoff moment, or an MVP, would help a lot. It's not the same, but it's perhaps similar to when Albert Pujols started his career on basically a nonstop tear, but because Barry Bonds was breaking the game, he didn't win MVP until his fifth season despite some absolutely ridiculous numbers. But on the other hand, Pujols was in the playoffs a lot, which is something Witt has been missing.
But yeah, combo of not being in a huge media market, not winning a lot of the best best best hardware, and not having any playoff moments means that Witt is probably under-appreciated as a great player, even though I'd struggle to call him underrated.
Okay fine fine, I should let our readers defend themselves, so one last (well-written) explanation from earlier
Yeah, the 2016 series was rough on me. I’d been a Cubs fan since I was 8, and a Cleveland fan since the early ‘90s. For most of the 90s I was probably more of a Cleveland fan than I was of my hometown 9, for obvious reasons. Another thing that made 2016 tough was that that Injuns team was just a lot more likeable than that Cubs team, though I’d say that about any team Lester and Maddon were on before/during/after 2016.
Seems eminently reasonable to me. A much lesser example is that I grew up in Tennessee but my dad is from St. Louis, and the Rams moved to STL before the Titans (nee Oilers) moved to Tennesse, so I was a Rams/Titans fan for the Rams/Titans super bowl
sometimes you pick teams in opposite leagues and they just meet in the championship. it happens.
alright, on that note, I'm gonna call it a chat. Pleasure talking with everyone as always. This time next week, we'll be World Series-ing! Very excited.
have a wonderful week, everyone
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
The fact that the 2006 – 2016 Tigers don’t have a world series to show for Miggy, JV, Scherzer and a whole host of other stars is way worse IMO.
As far as results yeah, but can’t really fault the Tigers for not pushing the chips in with that team. Mike Ilitch really wanted to win a World Series, which led to some big contracts and, eventually, big hangovers.
Late to the chat, but wouldn’t a heavier ball lead to even more pitching injuries?
It would also change the carry on the ball of drag is constant.
Any change to the ball is likely to have unforeseen consequences if you don’t really think it through (and preferably test it well).
I have been reading Will Carroll’s “Under the Knife” injury-focused Substack (and the column at BP before that) for years and he has suggested it a few times. He has mentioned that a few ounces is nearly undetectable to the pitcher, but does make a difference to the physics. It’s worth looking at IMO.
RE: war2d2 saying Cleveland was more likable than the Cubs… I’m a Cubs fan and am obviously biased, but I thought the 2016 Cubs were very likable.
I’m curious to see what others think.
Agree. Fun bunch
Cubs homer, but the 2016 team featured Rizzo, Bryant, Dexter Fowler, Zobrist, as well as Javy so I’m not sure I’m getting where the “not likable” factor is coming from. These were by all accounts pretty decent guys. And any team that employed a jackass like Trevor Bauer had better be careful about throwing stones. (And yes, I know Addison Russell turned out to be a terrible person)
I’m a Cubs anti-homer, but Rizzo more than once blew up a catcher after the Posey rule was in effect, and then jawed about he was just playing the game hard like he’d been taught to, even though every other player in baseball managed to stay in their lane and not smash into the catcher. Maddon said “It’s a perfect play by Rizzo.”
This was the year after Chris Coghlan broke Jung Ho Kang’s leg and ended his season (and then Kang’s idiotic off-field behavior ended his MLB career), and the Cubs brought him back for the 2016 run. Then Joe Maddon made a joke about “plantar fascitis.” Do not like that team at all.
Fully agree, the Cubs were detestable and obnoxious from the team to the suddenly relevant bandwagon fan base.
I’m a Cleveland fan but, Maddon Lackey, Baez and Lester were pretty irritating.
Plus they had elite domestic abusers in Chapman and Russell, of course we did not know about Russell at the time.
Witt question was interesting becsuse it is actually happening to Maikel Garcia. I believe Witts existence has probably cost him lots of money due to his not playing SS where I suspect he would do quite well and be considered a better player if he got credit for top 10ish SS defense. But I could be wrong
Regarding the Halloween theme – you all know there is a zombie emoji to put at 2nd base instead, right? That would make it more accurate to today’s MLB.